Listen to the secular!

Submitted by AWL on 19 May, 2015 - 5:10
Author: Martin Thomas

Pretty much all the left press other than Solidarity has denounced the election court decision against Lutfur Rahman, mayor of Tower Hamlets in East London, and most of the left has backed Rabina Khan, Rahman's ally, for the new mayoral election on 11 June.

Does the left press reckon that Rahman didn't do what the court disqualified him for doing? Or that he did do it, but it was all right? It's hard to tell. I don't know if the writers in the left press even read the judgement.

If they did read it, then probably, like me, they were annoyed by the style of the judge, Richard Mawrey - pompous, self-satisfied, arrogant. The judgement is full of show-off side comments. The Labour Party leadership has suspended left-winger Christine Shawcroft on the basis of one side comment in the judgement suggesting (wrongly, and irrelevantly to the case before Mawrey) that Shawcroft supported Rahman in the polls against Labour.

But probably most judges are pompous, self-satisfied, and arrogant. It goes with their social position. Yet often they can sum up evidence competently. Often they know that if they don't do it competently, they will be rebuked when the case is taken to appeal, as Rahman, a lawyer himself, is taking his case.

In a previous case, Mawrey found in favour of George Galloway's Respect group and against the Labour Party. Galloway's speech applauding that judgement is published in full on the Socialist Worker website. Mawrey's findings cannot be dismissed out of hand.

Mawrey found that charges of intimidation of polling stations, payment of canvassers, and impersonation of voters were not proved "beyond reasonable doubt". But other charges were. Rahman had made false allegations against his opponent (the offence for which Labour right-winger Phil Woolas had his election ruled invalid in 2010). Rahman was guilty of "bribery of the electorate" via redistribution of grants to Bangladeshi community groups which would back him. And he had organised "undue spiritual influence".

The left press has dismissed the last charge as anti-Muslim prejudice. But the judgement is explicit that there is nothing unlawful about imams, in their capacity as citizens, publicly backing Rahman. Unlawful is saying or suggesting that it is a religious duty to vote one way, or a damnable sin to vote the other way - the sort of thing which Catholic priests in Italy did, to boost the Christian Democrat vote after 1946 and until the decay of religion made it counterproductive.

The British law against "undue spiritual influence" dates from 1883. Its previous uses were in Ireland when still under British rule. The law was not, as some in the left press have suggested, a means to avoid the election of Catholic-backed nationalists. The British government had made its peace with the Irish Catholic church long before that. The conciliation is usually dated from the Maynooth Grant of 1845. The charges brought under the law were of priests declaring it a religious duty to vote against nationalists less in favour with the Church, such as the Parnellites (1890-1900) or Healy's All for Ireland League (1910).

If Rahman's clerical allies did something like the priests did in Ireland back then, or in Italy in the 1950s, then there is good reason to find the election invalid. If there is strong counter-evidence, on that charge or the others, then Rahman and his allies should publish it.

We know that Rahman has a soft-left Labour background, that Labour expelled him in a rigged-up summary execution, that he is close to the hierarchy of the East London Mosque. We know that the East London Mosque is one of the biggest in the country, built with large Saudi aid, and linked to the Islamic Forum of Europe and the Young Muslim Organisation, which are in turn linked to Bangladesh's Islamist party, Jamaat e-Islami.

Those facts are documented in many books such as Innes Bowen's Islam in Britain, reviewed by Matt Cooper in this paper in Solidarity 233.

It is also a fact that more secular-minded Muslims and Bangladeshis in the area find the religio-political power of the ELM/ IFE/ YMO complex overbearing.

Those background facts mean that Mawrey's findings cannot be dismissed out of hand. To dismiss them out of hand is to let down the more secular-minded Muslims and Bangladeshis in Tower Hamlets.